Polk State Website Attacked, No Personal Data Compromised but Safety Urged

At 8:10 a.m. on July 23, 2015, Polk State College became aware of malware on our website, www.polk.edu . Polk State College does its best to protect our customers and we immediately contacted our outside service provider and blocked access to the site from all campus workstations. The source of the problem was identified and addressed by our service provider by 2 p.m.. The site was active again by 2:35 p.m.

No personal information was compromised and not every visit to the site resulted in a malware infection. However, if you visited our website from an off-campus or personal computer during that time period, we recommend that you do a full virus scan on your machine.  In addition, we recommend that you keep your system up to date with all of the latest patches and software updates.

We are working with our web service provider to ensure that the proper security procedures are in place in order to prevent this type of incident in the future.  Additional updates about this incident will be posted on the College’s Information Technology and Services DNS Recent Threats and Notifications page. For more information, please contact the Office of Communications & Public Affairs at 863.292.3744